10/31/2007

Lestat de Lioncourt (a.k.a. The Vampire Lestat)

It's Halloween so I guess my instinct led me to watch The Vampire Lestat videos today though I really do not celebrate Halloween. Anyway, my love for Anne Rice and her vampires will never ever fade away, it started many years ago with Interview with the Vampire (the book) and went on with the sequels (oh, my beloved Memnoch the Devil and Merrick...) and, of course, the two movies. The first one, starring Brad Pitt as Louis and Tom Cruise as Lestat (and Antonio Banderas /Armand/, Kirsten Dunst /Claudia/) was perfect (no wonder, Rice wrote the screenplay) but the second, The Queen of the Damned... Well. Many Anne Rice-fans hate that movie for not being the interpretation of the book, The Queen of the Damned but I have always tried to watch it with different eyes. First of all, the actors. Late Aaliyah, divine Vincent Perez and Stuart Townsend, who, despite being a relatively unknown actor (especially comepared to his "wife", Charlize Theron) is wonderful, not only in this movie but in basically everything he's made (think Trapped; About Adam; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - he made me love villains and Dorian Gray even more).But I am not here to write about it. What I want to write about one of the spooky videos Lestat has made (okay, that were made for Lestat while they were shooting TQotD). There are 3: Redeemer, System and Forsaken. My favourite is Forsaken and you can watch it HERE.When I first saw the video it captured me and I couldn't set myself free ever since, not that I wanted to.I have always thought it would be splendid if someone realized how scary those old horrors could have been when they were premiered and how scary a contemporary horror film would be made with that technique.I am talking about Weine's Dr. Caligari that might seem ridiculous watched with 21st century eyes... So someone finally discovered it and not only Forsaken is made with that particular technique, it is also a kind of remake of Dr. Caligari's notable scenes:(Sorry for the bad quailty, I had to take the stills myself...)Forsaken is perfect and, of course, better than Caligeri - it sends the shivers down your spine, not because it's that "scary", of course it is a bit (at least not less scary than a usual horror), but it also has the irony. What makes it spooky is the fact that it is very dark, the lyrics are beautiful and thought wakening, and the discursive moves. Stuart's pretty face versus Lestat's brutally romantic murderer self is an excellent contradiction that actually works, since, you can never know who is a demon, literally and non-literally.I do not want to write more, I could but I guess it's only me who's stupidly obsessed with the theme... So, as a finale, a trivia via IMDb:Dr. Caligari writer Hans Janowtiz "claims to have gotten the idea for the film when he was at a carnival one day. He saw a strange man lurking in the shadows. The next day, he heard that a girl was murdered there. He went to the funeral, and saw the same strange man lurking around. He had no proof that the strange man was the murderer, but he fleshed the whole idea out into his film."